It’s been a while - February Development Blog

Our last dev blog was about 3-4 months ago? Wow, that really has been quite some time. On the bright side over the course of our silent hiatus, we got some pretty solid work done besides the short break we all took over the holidays. We would’ve totally dropped a dev blog or two during that time but we literally couldn’t because we’d either be showing the soldier stuff for the 500th time or showing or just telling you the entire plot. So with that out of the way, let’s hop right into what we are showing today!

Our new home

I’ve been meaning to do this for a little bit but just pushed it off again and again, so eventually, towards the beginning of this month after accomplishing all the other stuff I wanted to for the month I just bit the bullet and created it, and that is how you are reading this article right now unless you just got sent an excerpt or something from a friend. If that is the case, please visit the site, please. If I’m being honest I got the kick of motivation when I saw Project 17 debut their website so I just said, ‘damn, we should probably make our own site now’ (or something like that). Really nice work you guys have done over there by the way <3. Anyways, I’ll do my best to give a mini synopsis about why this website exists and what purpose it serves besides looking cool. I created this website in order to make a place that is centered around our project: Medium was cool and all but it lacked some features that I sought and our social presence was all over the place. Now that it’s all in one place, you won’t need (A. multiple accounts to actually view our stuff and (B. you won’t have to scour the internet to find updates, teasers, and whatever else we post (or not post). I put a whole lot of work and heart into this place so I’d really appreciate it if you took a look at every page this site has to offer (that is the one and the only hint I will provide on this website, if you’re confused about what this means, refer to latter). Now that the website shill side of me is done rambling, we are going to get hands-on with our next topic.

The part where I try to make hands sound interesting

Alyx’s hands: you either love them or hate them. They are floaty little things that have no physical body yet they make foley arm sounds and it hurts my head, some people wish they had full IK ultra-realistic arms. So what did we do? Absolutely nothing to solve that issue, but we did give some new floaty hands a spin! If you know anything about our project, you’d know that you do not play as Alyx, if you didn’t know that then I’ll tell you this: you do not play as Alyx. Since you aren’t Alyx that means you won’t have Alyx hands, what a big surprise. We played around with some ideas and concepts, ranging from combat gloves to construction gloves, to worker gloves (which we figured out are literally just fingerless gloves), to even bare hands. We ultimately decided on a mix between construction sorta gloves and just straight-up man hands.

Our initial goal was to use Eli’s hands

At first, this seemed like a good idea, high poly enough, age wasn’t too bad, and de-aging the texture wasn’t going to be too much of an issue. However, we had some issues to overcome and after some effort, it just didn’t look good.

So then we moved onto G-Man’s hands

These fit the same goals Eli’s did but are just a tad older so de-aging will need to be a bit more scrutinous. Overall, having some bare hands for the first part of the story provides the player with the knowledge that they are not playing as Alyx, they are playing as a male, and thirdly it directly ties into our new SWAGravity gloves.

(note: hands are still a WIP, the rig is a bit messed up and that flashlight wants to go elsewhere.)

The electromagnetic Retraction Gloves

This has been a pretty big challenge for us dating all the way back to June of 2021. We knew we wanted some custom G-Gloves but quite frankly didn’t know exactly what they’d look like. Luckily, since we have an incredibly talented concept artist, Skwallie, we have been able to bring this random disjointed but nonetheless awesome idea to life. Here is our take on the Gravity Gloves!

So here is a quick breakdown of why these gloves look this way and why they look so cool

We are really a fan of these gloves because they really fit the scrappiness of Lenny and they also are totally unique. The components are built into the gloves as opposed to being attached like the ones from the base game. This gives them their own unique character and better defines Lenny making do with what he is provided with. The reason why they look so cool is because Skwallie is a fantastic artist.

We have a model in the works right now for these bad boys so we will keep you updated in future dev blogs & on our socials (Twitter/Discord).

Really?! Soldiers again?

Yes really, now suck it up and stop whining. It’s no secret that we showcase our NPC framework a lot, probably a lot more than we should. However, it’s something to write about that won’t spoil everything in one go, so onward with the soldier stuff! To be honest, the soldiers remain basically the same but we delved into the world of audio with some response context stuff. By closely following Half-Life’s 2 ground-breaking NPC voice system (no seriously if you take a look into it, it is comically overdeveloped), we recreated the Soldier’s voice lines in Half-Life: Alyx. It is pretty surreal hearing them yell out those iconic call-outs in glorious Source 2 before I blast them in the face with a shotgun only to be greeted with a crash every 1/10 times because John Co broke literally everything. Literally, it is all on fire, please blame him. UPDATE: He fixed it, so take away all the blame you may have thrown his way.

Meeting Lenny

Higgue made the little basement where you’ll first lay eyes on Lenny, so that’s pretty cool I guess. Right? Here is a picture of it in its minimal art pass phase:

It’s nothing too special yet, but with time it will be! (totally didn’t do a mini art pass in SFM or anything hahahahaha)

This’ll be something awesome once it’s fully fleshed out but so far it’s a great start and a step in the right direction!

The voices in my head, and at some point yours too

Another thing we’ve been putting off that we finally accomplished was casting some voice actors and boy oh boy did we hit jackpot. We acquired some awesome people with some awesome talent. Let me introduce you to the cast:

Percy is voiced by Xtraflux, a good friend of mine and our main character.

Lenny is voiced by Shoob, he has been involved almost since the very beginning and just gives off the most chill and easy-going friendly vibes which is why he makes a perfect Lenny.

Last but not least Ronald, he is an extremely talented voice actor with an INCREDIBLE range. It is not even funny how many different voices he can do. He is basically our variety voice actor because of the range he has.

Maybe our next cast member could be YOU! If you want to offer some voice acting skills for some rebels, citizens, or even metrocops then shoot over an application. We believe in you!

This is where I get off

Unfortunately, this is where I must retreat back to the Anti-Citizen development cave where we are locked away from all outside contact. It has been nice chatting with everyone and showing off what has been keeping us busy and driving us insane over the past few months. I hope you enjoyed what we showed and continue to stay with us throughout our development process. Thanks for all the support, you mean the world to us! ‘Til next time.